Published: March 09, 2006 04:19 pm            

Straight or winding, path of faith varies depending on who’s taking it

Faith can be a straight and narrow path or a long and winding road.

My parents chose the most direct route — the unflinching, committed and resolute route. All three of their children, though, took long detours from faith during their lives.

My parents, both raised in the church, met as teens at a church conference and became reacquainted a few years later at a religious university in Oklahoma. After they married, they began a new life in California where churchgoing, service and faith was the strong foundation. Even during moves around the country — Colorado, Florida and back to California — a steady home could be found in a home church.

We spent most Sunday mornings and evenings at church, returning again for Wednesday night youth groups. High school choir, summer camps and fun activities made church a major part of our social life and family experience.

However, at separate points during our adulthood, and independently of each other, my brother, sister and I were diverted from our parent’s faith journey.

I think I can speak safely for the three of us when I say the rejection of our faith was not based on rebellion against our parents. My parents were not tyrants who kept us cloistered in a Christian community. We attended school dances, toasted the holidays with a small glass of wine or eggnog, and went often to the movies. Although our family regularly attended church events and services, my father often said, “You don’t have to punch a time clock at church,” suggesting that wasn’t the only place to experience God.

As a parent, I can imagine how difficult it must have been for my parents to stand by and watch their birds leave the religious nest and fly off into the spiritual unknown. Actually, they didn’t really stand by at all — they were on their knees in prayer. My mother has admitted that is what gave her and my father strength when our faith was weak.

The points in life we each chose to veer off the road were entirely different. My brother, the eldest, announced at 18 that he, as an adult who could vote or be drafted, would no longer attend church.

A hard-working young man who at only 16 was promoted to manager of a retail store, he was offended while working at our church one summer when his employers judged him by the length of his hair and beard rather than the quality of his work. He deemed the church full of hypocrites who tried to hide their character flaws beneath trimmed chins and short haircuts.

I remember my father becoming concerned for my sister’s wavering faith when she sent out Christmas cards with the greeting, “May the force be with you.” (Hey, this was the ’70s, I guess.) She became disillusioned with God sometime after the failure of her first marriage. She was disappointed with and, I think, distrustful of the faith to which she had clung with such conviction that she was known for her self-possessed witness at both her public high school and Christian college.

I was focused on my new career, far from family, friends and everything familiar, when I put my faith on a shelf and left it there for nearly a decade. I was spiritually detached and intellectually skeptical.

But, like pilgrims, we progressed. Each of us returned to the God of our youth at our own time, on our own schedule and urged by completely different motives.

My brother discovered during a blinding blizzard in the mountains of California that he had allowed mankind’s flaws to blind his vision of God’s deity. My sister’s was a gradual journey in which she once again learned to rely not only on her powerful inner strength and talents but her equally powerful and compelling faith. My return to God came at a time in my life when I had a toddler tugging on my hand and I slowly realized that there was another demanding pull from above that seemed equally real and vital.

Despite the detours, the starts and stops, we each returned — without nagging from our mother or lectures about damnation from our dad — to the path our parents had tread before us. However, the winding road we took to our adult faith and our current relationship with God provided us with some advantages we might have missed otherwise.

I think we learned a little about what separation from God feels like, and we don’t want to go there again. We also know what it is like not to believe so resolutely, so we understand the language of the doubtful and the skeptics. Further, we are not afraid of the difficult and challenging religious questions that may still rise in our minds because we’ve asked them before and we’ve grown to accept an answer that sometime simply relies on faith.

Faith, for us all, is a journey. Some walk sure-footed through life. Other’s slip off the course and then eventually stagger back on. Still others may not move in any direction, feeling the scenery is fine and the ground is stable where they stand; they may be missing the adventure of a spiritual search. There are too many other types of traveler to list, but one day all of us will see where this journey ends.

Jaletta Albright Desmond, of Bluefield, Va., is a syndicated columnist who writes about faith and family for the Daily Telegraph. Contact her at jdesmond@bdtonline.com.

        

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